Would we lie to you?
We are truth-seekers in the knowledge multiverse, seeking an uncertain path towards enlightenment through a cascade of collapsed quantum realities.
Feedback types this sentence with only half an eye on a new paper in the journal Evolutionary Psychology from Martin Harry Turpin at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and his colleagues, titled .
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We were of course aware that bullshitting 鈥� defined helpfully by the researchers as 鈥渁n intent to be convincing or impressive without concern for truth鈥� 鈥� was a highly active area of psychological research long, long before a colleague waved this paper in front of our nose with a meaningful stare. Although naturally we favour the characterisation of bullshit in Daniel Mears鈥檚 2002 classic paper as 鈥渕isleading, yet possible, though frequently improbable, accounts or impressions of self or reality鈥�.
In this latest study, the researchers first analysed participants鈥� willingness to bullshit by asking them to rate their knowledge of 10 concepts, four of which didn鈥檛 exist. Ability to bullshit was then tested by subdividing participants into Bullshit Producers, who were tasked with coming up with explanations for the concepts, and Bullshit Raters, who were asked to rate how satisfying they found them. Finally, the susceptibility of all participants to bullshit was measured by getting them to rate the profundity of 10 meaningless, but grammatically plausible, statements, 10 motivational quotations 鈥� a sort of halfway house to bullshit, we imagine 鈥� and 10 mundane statements.
The headline result 鈥� that ability to bullshit was correlated with high intelligence as measured via independent tests 鈥� masks a wealth of insights worth taking into the next management seminar or similar celebration of bullshit.
Ability to bullshit proved to be unrelated either to susceptibility to bullshit or willingness to bullshit, suggesting that perhaps sometimes you just need to get over yourself. A high ability to bullshit led to the bullshitted assessing bullshitters as more intelligent, suggesting it is highly worthwhile doing so.
Interestingly, willingness to bullshit was also correlated to susceptibility to bullshit, proving, in the researchers鈥� words, that 鈥渋t may indeed be possible to 鈥榖ullshit a bullshitter'鈥�. Given we find all the insights from this study highly intelligent and convincing, we are now slightly worried.
Left hanging
The dangling modifier is the cruellest of syntactical misconstructions, and few of us don鈥檛 descend into gibberish when we have a microphone suddenly shoved into our faces. So we have every sympathy with the passer-by who, when asked on ABC news last week whether he had seen the southern right whale in New South Wales, Australia, exclaimed happily: 鈥淵es, I saw it driving across the bridge!鈥� Give them time, give them time.
A rather less explicable example, combining a new and alarming addition to the cosmic zoo with one of our favourite entirely unintelligible measurement comparators, comes courtesy of a pull-quote in a Guardian Weekly article on gravitational waves, declaring 鈥�50m 鈥� The number of elephants weighing the same as a thimbleful of merging neutron stars once they stop collapsing, sending GWs through space鈥�.
Our thanks to Barry Smith-Roberts and Tim Stevenson for those. We can only marvel at the wonders of evolution reading these things.
They shall not grow old
Meanwhile, The Times declares in a spotted by Hilary Johnson that 鈥渁nother extinct human, Homo longi, has been found in China, which scientists believe could be our closest living relative鈥�.
This is perplexing on many levels, although not as personally distressing as the BBC News website headline . As Alex Hodge points out, that must have been a bummer after he made it that far.
Heavens above
Neatly combining two of last week鈥檚 items, on importunate PR emails and new attempts to explain unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, a PR agent for writes asking us whether we had received their previous communication.
Narrowly avoiding the obvious joke, we concentrate on the substance, which is a league table of European countries ranked according to their number of 鈥渁lien visits鈥�. That Ireland by far and away tops the list, with 105 sightings of UAPs, mainly in the form of 鈥渓ight formations鈥� lasting an average of 13 minutes, we can only ascribe to the confusing atmospheric conditions that often prevail late at night on the Atlantic seaboard.
Alien intelligence, for we are apparently assuming that is what it is, seems least interested in San Marino. The landlocked Apennine country recorded a grand total of zero sightings lasting 0 minutes across the unidentified time periods, or UTPs, that the numbers cover.
Oddly, there is no figure given for the other tiny Italian enclave, Vatican City. This we can only put down to a desire not to skew the statistics.
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